The crisis of the Islamic Republic and the tasks of the Iranian working class

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The crisis of the Islamic Republic and the tasks of the Iranian
working class
29 December 2009

Since last Saturday, opponents of the Iranian government have
repeatedly clashed with security forces and Basij militiamen in
Teheran, Tabriz and many other Iranian cities.

Information is limited by government restrictions on foreign and
opposition media, but the clashes have resulted in at least 8 and
possibly as many as 15 deaths, and left scores injured. Official
spokesmen claim that dozens of police officers, including the
commander of the Teheran police, have been injured and “some killed.”

The dead protesters include a nephew of Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former
prime minister of the Islamic Republic and the main challenger to
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in last June’s presidential election. Ali-Habibi
Mousavi was reportedly shot in the back during anti-government
protests Sunday. Opposition supporters have termed his death a
targeted assassination.

Police admit to having arrested 300 protesters Sunday. Yesterday,
security forces arrested top aides of Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami,
Iran’s president from 1997 to 2005. They also took Ebrahim Yazdi, the
current head of Mehdi Bazargan’s Freedom Movement of Iran, into custody.

Six months after Iran’s disputed June 12 presidential election, the
government headed by Islamic Guardian Ayatollah Khamanei and President
Ahmadinejad has manifestly failed to quell the opposition challenge to
its legitimacy.

Government officials, including police chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moqadam,
had vowed that they would stamp out any attempt by supporters of
Mousavi’s “Green Revolution” to use Sunday’s commemorations of Ashura,
a Shiite holy day long associated with political protest, to stage
anti-government actions.

Yet tens and probably hundreds of thousands joined anti-government
protests, including in Esfahan and Najafabad—cities in central Iran
that had been considered government strongholds. While many of the
protesters wore green, thereby identifying themselves with Mousavi’s
call for reform of the Islamic Republic, many also took up slogans
that directly challenged its existence, including “Death to the
Dictator!” A report in the New York Times said the opposition protests
have begun to attract participants from working class south Teheran.

The protagonists of the Green Revolution—Mousavi, Khatami and Hashemi
Rafsanjani, the billionaire capitalist, ex-president, and current head
of the Assembly of Exerts and the Expediency Discernment Council—are
all pillars of the Islamic Republic. But they now find themselves in
the nominal leadership of a movement that seems to be taking on a
quasi-insurrectional character.

Iran’s bourgeois clerical establishment has fractured under the impact
of the world economic crisis, the mounting social contradictions of
the Islamic Republic, and unrelenting pressure from US imperialism.

According to the Economist, Iran’s economy grew just 0.5 percent in
the past year, as oil revenue slumped from $82 billion in 2008 to less
than $60 billion. Official figures place inflation at over 15 percent
and unemployment at more than 11 percent.

In 2005, Ahmadinejad captured the presidency by posing as an opponent
of the neo-liberal policies pursued by his predecessors, Khatami and
Rafasanjani. In fact he pressed forward with privatization, selling
off some $63 billion in government assets, although, to the chagrin of
Rafsanjani and other bazaar capitalists, much of the bounty went not
to them, but to businessmen with close ties to the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps.

To offset pressure from below, Ahmadinejad used the increased state
revenues that resulted from the 2005-2008 oil boom to boost social
spending. This policy was bitterly resented by powerful sections of
the Iranian bourgeoisie, and under the impact of the economic crisis
Ahmadinejad has been forced to announce plans for radical economic
restructuring, involving the phasing out of food, energy, water,
transport and other subsidies. This has failed to satisfy his critics
within the Iranian elite, who denounce him for promoting welfare
dependency.

There are also sharp divisions over how to pursue the Iranian
bourgeoisie’s great power ambitions in the Persian Gulf region under
conditions of unrelenting hostility from US imperialism.

Over the past two decades, Washington has repeatedly rebuffed Iranian
offers for the normalization of relations and a “grand bargain.”
Instead, under Clinton, George W. Bush and now Obama, it has ratcheted
up pressure on Teheran through sanctions, the promotion of “regime
change,” and threats of military action. Today, the US is waging war
in three countries bordering Iran—Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—and
is threatening, come January 1, to rally the other great powers to
impose new and “crippling” sanctions against Teheran.

Last spring, with some fanfare, President Obama offered to “engage”
with Teheran. But as both he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
explained, this in no way represented a softening of US demands that
Teheran abandon its nuclear fuel program and, more generally, accept
American dominance in the Middle East. Rather, it was an attempt to
exploit the fissures in the Iranian elite and lay the diplomatic
groundwork for an escalation of sanctions.

Eight months later, the Obama administration is preparing to go beyond
Bush and Cheney by pressing for a world gasoline export embargo on
Iran, which, given Teheran’s dependence on imported gasoline, would
deliver a body blow to its economy.

At the same time, it is encouraging the “Green Revolution,” whose
leaders—especially Rafsanjani and Khatami—have long been publicly
identified with the push for a rapprochement with Washington.

The Iranian working class must take advantage of this crisis to mount
its own challenge to the Islamic Republic. The precondition for such a
challenge is opposition to, and independence from, all factions of the
bourgeoisie.

The Western media, with the virtual unanimous support of middle-class
organizations that have lined up behind Obama to make their peace with
imperialism, have proclaimed Iran’s bourgeois opposition a
“democratizing” movement.

But the basic needs of the Iranian people—freedom from imperialist
oppression, democratic rights, jobs, public services and social
equality—will not be achieved by aligning with any section of the
national bourgeoisie, let alone one, as in the case of the leaders of
the “Green Revolution,” that is eager to make a bargain with US
imperialism and is pressing for more radical anti-working class
socio-economic policies.

The tragedy of contemporary Iran is that the mighty anti-imperialist
revolution of 1978-79 was hijacked and perverted by the bourgeoisie
through a section of the clergy spouting Shia populism and Iranian
nationalism.

What made this possible was the criminal policies pursued by the
Tudeh, Iran’s Stalinist party. It subordinated the working class to
the forces grouped around Ayatollah Khomeini, claiming that, as Iran
is an oppressed country of belated capitalist development, the Iranian
revolution could not go beyond the “bourgeois-democratic” stage.

Thirty years on, the lessons of this vital experience must be brought
to the Iranian working class and serve to guide a revolutionary
challenge to the Islamic Republic based on a socialist and
internationalist program.

Keith Jones

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/pers-d29.shtml

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